The Lost Pianos of Siberia. Sophy Roberts

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      ‘Pay no heed to the boasting of Russians; they confuse splendour with elegance, luxury with refinement, policing and fear with the foundations of society,’ wrote the French traveller the Marquis de Custine, of the Russia he found around the time Liszt was in St Petersburg. ‘Up to now, as far as civilization is concerned, they have been satisfied with appearances, but if they were ever to avenge their real inferiority, they would make us pay cruelly for our advantages over them.’ De Custine – described by one historian as a camp, – was a powerful influence in the West’s early (and enduring) perception of backwards Russia: ‘The Russians have gone rotten without ever ripening!’ he wrote in 1839, citing a well-known aphorism of the time. If the West still looks down on Russia, it has an even more pronounced attitude towards Siberia – and it was ever thus. ‘There are few places on the earth’s surface about which the majority of mankind have such definite ideas with so little personal knowledge as Siberia,’ observed a British economist travelling through the country in 1919.

      On first encounter, Khabarovsk was wrapped in this fog of stereotypes. It was a leaden sprawl in monochrome with neither the brutal beauty of Moscow nor the peppermint-coloured grace of St Petersburg. There was a museum about a bridge, another about fish, a third about the history of gas extraction. The snow was dirty, like the midnight stipple on an old television channel. Trails from smokestacks streaked the sky with worry lines. Signs of urban prosperity were thin: a European-style boulevard with blushes of pink paint, and a promenade with white railings used as a set for wedding photographs beside the frozen Amur River. At least I hadn’t come in summer, when the surrounding forest turns to swamp blackened with mosquitoes, their wings pricking the surface like drizzle, their swollen corpses falling into every spoonful of soup.

      Aleksandr Batalov, the local tiger researcher I had come to meet, didn’t speak much at first. In his middle sixties, he was broad and short, with grey eyes and wide shoulders honed by the pull-ups he practised on a bar that hung across the doorway of his cabin in the forest. He wore a pair of felt boots gifted to him by a colonel in the Russian army, and mismatched camouflage fatigues. Following us in another van out to the forest was a driver carrying food supplies and extra blankets. The driver’s face was sallow, scored by a lifetime of pulling hard on cigarettes, his lack of charisma matching a description that the early-twentieth-century explorer Vladimir Arseniev gave to the local men who joined him on his expeditions through this territory. ‘The Siberians were selected not for their social qualifications,’ he wrote, ‘but because they were resourceful men accustomed to roughing it.’

      Arseniev was right. Our driver was efficient when the engine coughed and cut, but not once did he attempt conversation. The Uzbek cook at Aleksandr’s research base wasn’t much of a talker either, leaving me to wonder how the Silk Road town of Samarkand and the golden roads that once led to it must have hit a catastrophic slump in fortune for a man to venture here, to abandon the fat peaches of his native Fergana Valley in Uzbekistan for Siberia’s bony fish. For the Uzbek, it was unclear if Siberia marked the end of the road, or a new beginning.

      We rumbled out of Khabarovsk, passing workers gathered at the bus stops, their breath suspended in the air. We passed a shopping mall on the city’s outskirts, where a few months prior, a brown bear had wandered in. The bear was shot and bundled into the back of a white van, head hanging like a teddy without its stuffing. Aleksandr then described a boar that had recently rammed the doors of a Khabarovsk hotel. Each of Aleksandr’s stories implied that Siberia was teeming with wildlife, when a century ago, Dersu Uzala, the indigenous trapper who led Arseniev’s expeditions, warned of the environment’s demise: he gave it ten years before all the sable and squirrel would be gone.

      Dersu Uzala belonged to the Nanai tribe, also called ‘the fishskin Tatars’ after their habit of using dried fishskins for clothes. In the late sixteenth century, Siberia’s population comprised almost a quarter of a million indigenous people living as nomads, fishermen, hunters and reindeer herders. The Nanai were one among around five hundred unique Siberian tribes. Belief systems were shamanist and animist.

      Dersu Uzala, photographed c. 1906, acted as a guide for Vladimir Arseniev’s expedition, and twice saved his life. In 1975, the story was turned into an Oscar-winning film, Dersu Uzala, by the Japanese director Akira Kurosawa.

      This mix began to change in the seventeenth century. Religious dissidents who refused to sign up to reforms in the Russian Orthodox Church fled east of the Urals to escape repression in European Russia. They formed ‘Old Believer’ communities, which still exist today. The process of Russian cultural assimilation among minorities picked up under Catherine the Great, with a rapid expansion in Siberian trade. Disease, brought in by the influx of outsiders, also spread into indigenous communities. By the middle of the seventeenth century, Russian settlers – as opposed to just convicts, who were only ever a small proportion of Siberia’s new population – were outnumbered by indigenous Siberians at a ratio of around three to one. By the end of the nineteenth century, that ratio had changed, with five citizens of Russian descent to one indigenous Siberian. With these demographic shifts – not unique to Russia, given what the Europeans were up to with their overseas colonies – Orthodox Christianity soon prevailed. Forced collectivization in the Soviet period, as well as a stringent ‘Russifying’ political ideology, then brought the last of Siberia’s indigenous outliers into line. Shamanism, banned by Lenin in the twenties, is no longer close to what it was before. With the old blood mixed up with the new, Slavic features are found in faces that look a little Korean, Mongolian, even Native American. Siberia’s original hundred-odd languages are disappearing. The Kerek tongue, spoken in the Far North, is close to extinction. There are more tigers left in Siberia than there are Itelmen-speaking people.

      There had been fresh snowfall overnight in Khabarovsk. The further we drove, the thicker the drifts. By the time we turned off the road at the village of Durmin, the track was smothered. Marsh grasses arced under the weight, and seedheads nodded like silver pom-poms. In the solitude, it was hard to imagine the Russian taiga – the so-called ‘tipsy forest’, named after the skinny, deracinated trees – rustling with sable. This relative of the marten once thrived in the wooded belt between Russia’s grassy southern steppe and the northern tundra inside the Arctic Circle. From the mid-sixteenth century, sable was Russia’s ‘soft gold’, accounting for up to ten per cent of the state income, its silken fur, each dark chocolate hair tipped in silver as if sprinkled in morning frost, drawing bands of ruffian Cossack mercenaries. Answering to the Tsars, the Cossacks colonized Siberia so rapidly, they reached the Pacific within sixty-odd years of making their first incursion over the Urals.

      Aleksandr spotted a field mouse on the road, which we just avoided running over. ‘Don’t look after the shrew, and we have big problems,’ he said, explaining how the natural chains are breached with every felling of an oak tree. When predator and prey lose their place in the world, tigers are forced to migrate into territory where they don’t belong. He told me to listen out for ravens, which cluster around a kill. He wanted to show me a nuthatch, which was his favourite bird. Between sharing facts about the forest, Aleksandr talked a little about politics – how the socialist idea was a good one, though other nations wouldn’t have stood it for so long. Russians have an ability to endure, he said, to test an idea from the beginning to its end. He described the vacuum that was created, and his disappointment, when the USSR disintegrated. He talked about the riverside cabin of his Siberian childhood, how it was surrounded by rolling wheat fields and mountains where he used to collect berries which his grandmother folded into yoghurt. A large basket took two hours to fill. It was on expeditions like this that he learned to observe the behaviour of animals, including hares, birds, roe deer, foxes and wolves. At the age of five, he spied on a family of cranes, hiding himself in the pond so that only his eyes and nose were above the water. But the cranes got angry and attacked him.

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